engleski

Us and Them: Tolerance of linguistic intolerance

The semantics of the dichotomous model Us and Them implies inequality in status between two communities or between social groups within one community, no matter what the parameters of difference may be. In any such case there is a difference in identity, and since there has always been a hierarchy of identities, of languages, and of cultures, identity politics attributes higher status to some and lower status to others. The concept of tolerance as ''harmony in difference'' and intercultural competence seek to overcome such divisions, stressing the importance of respect for and acceptance of the Others and their cultures, languages, value systems, communication, and freedom of thought. In practice, it is social status that dictates communication both in interpersonal or intragroup communication and in political and media discourse, on the level of form and on that of content alike. Despite all disagreements and differences in habitus between speakers (cultural, political, ideological, educational…), we should call for zero tolerance toward hate speech and discriminatory language. Linguistic intolerance is just one of the forms of nonacceptance of Others, and can be on all levels since there are always vernaculars, dialects, sociolects or languages found undesirable in multicultural and multilingual societies, and speakers of these are heavily sanctioned (for instance, Creole speakers in Haiti). This brings us to the paradoxical situation where language intolerance is tolerated! Linguistic intolerance can show up within a single shared language in the shape of rejecting and/or stigmatizing an individual for his (different) beliefs and speech-act pragmatics. Naturally one's choice of pragmatic strategies, together with one's pragmatic accent (Yule 1998), also suggests one's intention as a speaker, since it allows reading the meaning of what is left unspoken. Sociopragmatics (Leech 1983 ; Tannen 2005 ; Scollon & Scollon 2001, 2003) and analysis of public discourse will point out the forms of linguistic intolerance in various social and cultural contexts. The goal is to explain how extralinguistic factors can influence the choice of linguistic elements in manifesting political supremacy, which generates all the sorts of social and individual inequality and intolerance explicitly articulated in the Us and Them/Others model.

tolerance, linguistic intolerance, Us and Them, sociopragmatics, public discourse

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